“Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape
Who dost in every country change thy shape!”
Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer
"Beauty," complete poem in The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, Samuel Johnson ed., vol. 7, p. 115.
A Far Sunset (1967)
“Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape
Who dost in every country change thy shape!”
Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer
"Beauty," complete poem in The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, Samuel Johnson ed., vol. 7, p. 115.
“Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.”
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer
To My Daughters, With Love (1967)
Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet
Liebe machet schoene wîp:
desn mac diu schoene niht getuon, sin machet niemer lieben lîp.
"Herzeliebez vrowelîn", line 17; translation from Frederick Goldin German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages (New York: Anchor, 1973) p. 121.
“The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.”
Ned Rorem (1923–2022) American composer
[Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day, ISBN 041522974X, 2001, Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (eds)]
“All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.”
W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer
St. 1 <br class="br">Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/
“A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.”
Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist
The Sense of Wonder (1965)
Context: A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
“If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.”
William Gaddis book The Recognitions
Source: The Recognitions
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer
What is Art? (1897)
Context: The good is the everlasting, the pinnacle of our life. … life is striving towards the good, toward God. The good is the most basic idea … an idea not definable by reason … yet is the postulate from which all else follows. But the beautiful … is just that which is pleasing. The idea of beauty is not an alignment to the good, but is its opposite, because for most part, the good aids in our victory over our predilections, while beauty is the motive of our predilections. The more we succumb to beauty, the further we are displaced from the good.... the usual response is that there exists a moral and spiritual beauty … we mean simply the good. Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.